Not now

Terry Gross talked to Masha Gessen about Putin’s war on Ukraine last Thursday.

My guest, Masha Gessen, is a Russian-American journalist who reported in late January and February from Ukraine, then went to Moscow after the invasion. On the night Putin shut down the last remaining independent source of TV news, Gessen was at that studio. Gessen’s dispatches are being published in The New Yorker, where Gessen is a staff writer. Gessen left Moscow on Thursday and is speaking to us from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.

For 20 years, Gessen was a journalist in Moscow and had been the chief correspondent for Russia’s leading news magazine until it became impossible to report the real news. After that, Gessen moved to a popular science magazine. In 2013, when it became too dangerous to remain in Russia because of Putin’s anti-gay laws, Gessen moved to New York with their partner and their adopted son and their two other children. Gessen uses the pronouns they/them. They have written extensively about Putin, including in their book “The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin.” Gessen warned about Trump’s authoritarian style of leadership and its parallels to Putin in the book “Surviving Autocracy.”

The interview is not great (which is unusual for Fresh Air); Gessen talks very slowly and as if with difficulty, which is entirely understandable in the circumstances but just not ideal for radio. It’s good that there’s a transcript.

That said…I find it pretty jarring to go from what’s happening in Ukraine and Moscow to luxury pronouns. Using “they/them” is really not ideal for a journalist doing an interview for the simple and non-political reason that it’s confusing. Ordinarily in such an interview “they” and “them” would mean Russians or Ukrainians or refugees or soldiers, not one of the people doing the interview. Also the interview is about Ukraine, not Gessen (and I’m sure Gessen would agree), so making room for the specialty pronouns is just not very appropriate in this context. It’s a bit like pausing to ask “What are you wearing?” It’s extra, it’s non-essential, and therefore in this context it’s frivolous and a bit obnoxious. For all I know Gessen would have preferred to leave it out, and it was NPR or Gross or both who decided to say it. At any rate, I wish they’d left it out.

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